Superboat hits a UFO and sinks. It’s a mystery

The damned items abandoned by criminals at sea (U.F.O.) have claimed another victim. The Infiniti 52 Tullikettu sank in Portugal after hitting an unidentified floating object. Infinity 52 was cruising from Cascais to the team’s base in Gosport (England), when it collided with UFO. Two days after launching the SOS the entire crew of four was evacuated on a tanker, Tulikettu was abandoned at the mercy of the sea. All four crew members survived and are unharmed.

Mystery and controversy

Attempts to save the boat were vain, not least because the locator was not working because the boat’s batteries had become wet. They had stopped working and there was no more power on board. The controversy concerns the crew who waited two days before launching the signal from the portable EPIRB, it seems likely that the crew members on board hoped that Tulikettuf would still be able to sail.

An almost flying boat

The Infiniti 52 Tullikettu is a 16-metre-long, 4.5-metre-wide, 3.6-metre-draft boat costing more than a million euro. It was equipped with DSS, stabilizers extending laterally from the hull to reduce heel and provide a lift effect to facilitate planing..

Click here and find out more more about DSS

The Infiniti 52 has very high performance without the cost of more complex foil solutions. The DSS foil provides the Infiniti 52 with a significant righting moment which allows it to sail with a reduced crew, sometimes half that of a comparable yacht.

Giovanni Soldini also risked sinking

UFOs are becoming a huge problem. There are tens of thousands of semi-submerged objects in the world’s seas, including in the Mediterranean, which are often abandoned by transport ships and cause breakdowns and sinking. One example is what happened to Giovanni Soldini with his Maserati trimaran, whose story we reported HERE during the Transpac Pacific Seas race.